Chap. I. 
UNDEK DOMESTICATION^. 
13 
father and child, we cannot tell whether it may not be 
due to the same cause having acted on both ; but when 
amongst individuals, apparently exposed to the same 
conditions, any very rare deviation, due to some extraor¬ 
dinary combination of circumstances, appears in the 
parent^—say, once amongst several million individuals 
—and it reappears in the child, the mere doctrine of 
chances almost compels us to attribute its reappearance 
to inheritance. Every one must have heard of cases of 
albinism, prickly skin, hairy bodies, &c., appearing in 
several members of the same family. If strange and 
rare |,deviations of structure are truly inherited, less 
strange and commoner deviations may be freely ad¬ 
mitted to be inheritable. Perhaps the correct way of 
viewing the whole subject, would be, to look at the in¬ 
heritance of every character whatever as the rule, and 
non-inheritance as the anomaly. 
The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; 
no one can say why a peculiarity in different individuals 
of the same species, or in individuals of different species, 
is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so ; why the 
child often reverts in certain characters to its grand¬ 
father or grandmother or other more remote ancestor; 
why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to 
both sexes, or to one sex alone, more commonly but not 
exclusively to the like sex. It is a fact of some little 
importance to us, that peculiarities appearing in the 
males of our domestic breeds are often transmitted either 
exclusively, or in a much greater degree, to males alone. 
A much more important rule, which I think may be 
trusted, is that, at whatever period of life a peculiarity 
first appears, it tends to appear in the offspring at a 
corresponding age, though sometimes earlier. In many 
cases this could not be otherwise : thus the inherited 
peculiarities in the horns of cattle could appear only in 
